Classically, as we qualified and engaged our customers in solving their problems, sales people focused on understanding our customers’ needs.  Our questioning process was focused on identifying pains, needs, and problems so we could present a justified solution addressing those issues.

Don’t get me wrong, these are still important parts of the selling and buying processes, but if this is where we are first engaging the customer, then we aren’t maximizing the value we can create, and we aren’t maximizing our ability to win.

Intercepting our customers at this point of the buying process is too late.  By this time, the customer has already well defined their problem, they’ve organized to solve it, they have probably done a lot of research in assessing alternatives.  In fact, unless you are on their short list, there’s a high likelihood they won’t even want to see you or give you a chance to assess needs.

Sales people create the greatest value by engaging customers much earlier—before they even recognize they should do something.  Customers may be so busy or so sheltered they may not recognize they have a problem or there is a different way of doing things.  They are focused on their day to day operations and may be blind to the fact they might be missing opportunities.

Sales people get to see lots of customers and different ways of doing things.  Sales people have the time to look at emerging opportunities and understand how the customer might take advantage of them.  Removed from the day to day chore of running the business, sales people has a different view and may not be blinded as customers might be.

Customers expect sales people to provide insight, to help them learn how they might improve and grow.  Customers may not know they should have needs or what those needs are, because they haven’t recognize the opportunity.  They may be numb to the pain, so they don’t know their pains.
Sales people must engage their customers earlier, creating the awareness or vision to do something different, helping the customer discover they have needs and pain, helping the customer define the problem and what they want to do, helping the customer organize to solve the problem, and define their needs, requirements and priorities.

We need to understand our customers’ needs and priorities.  However, if that’s the first time we are engaged, your competitor may have been there before—creating greater value and positioning themselves to win.

Are you engaging your customers appropriately?

Let’s face it, customers really hate us.  They will tolerate our marketing content—as long as it isn’t too promotional—just the facts please.  Sales people, well that’s another story, we’re really a total waste of their time, unless the are looking for lunch or a golf game.  With the exception of the lunch and golf game, the web now can solve virtually all our customer problems.  Customers can find peers, other people who have the same interests, concerns, problems.  “Trusted sources,” that can provide much” higher quality information and insight” about vendor products than the we can.  Our role as suppliers is now to sit politely by the phone, wait for it to ring, then answer any remaining specific questions the customer may have, process their order (if we are fortunate enough to be the supplier selected), smile and thank them for their business.

Our buyers are so fortunate.  We know all that information is totally accurate.  We know those users or people who have experience know everything there is to know about our products and services, and how they apply specifically to the problems other companies have.  We know these are totally without agenda (or even being compensated).

We also know that our customers know exactly what they are looking for.  We know they have all the right questions and just need answers.  We know they know how to solve their problems, so they are just looking for data and information.  We know they have the time, ability, and judgement to invest in searching the web, engage in conversations with people they have never met, talk about their proprietary information and problems.  Imagine a web based conversation, “Our manufacturing process really sucks, we have too much scrap, bad quality, and poor customer satisfaction and are looking to reduce those problems…in your experience, what are the best solutions to that?”  Or “Our financial systems are a mess, we can’t close our books, we don’t know if we are properly reporting our results, if we are in compliance with government regulations…. what have you done to solve that problem?”

Yes the web is the answer to our customer prayers.  We need to transform our organizations to better serve our customers and to more effectively process those orders.  We need to spend more time encouraging our current customers to spend less time doing their jobs and more time participating in web based forums, maybe we can even provide them some copy they can use in their discussions.  (Perhaps this is the role for all the displaced marketing and sales people).

Frankly, I am getting PISSED OFF with all the apologists for sales and marketing.  I’m angry with all those naive enough to think that marketing and sales can bring no value or insight to our customers and they should be displaced by web based forums.  Finally, I am terrified for our customers who may not even recognize they have a problem or may be so busy just surviving they can’t spend the time solving their problems.

Sure, we deserve much of the criticism that is leveled at marketing and sales.  Every day, we are bombarded with an ever escalating volume of messages, promotional content, and stupid sales pitches.  Too many organizations seem to see the solution to this move to the web is to turn up the volume.  This only serves to piss customers off, rather than turning up the volume, we need to turn up the quality and customer experience.

If we can’t turn up the quality of the customer engagement, if we can turn up the quality of the customer experience, if we cannot offer real insight and value to our customers, then the web is probably the best solution.

But I think too much of our customers to succumb to that.  I think too much of our companies and shareholders to to succumb to this.  I think too much of the value we as sales and marketing professionals can offer to succumb to that.  We have to change and we are changing.  We have a huge amount to offer to our customer and can create real value.  We can provide our customers insight they can’t get anywhere else.  We walk the halls, visit the plants, talk to lots of people in our customers.  We see new possibilities, we see opportunities to help them grow and improve.  We can offer help and advice, we can create real meaning in helping them outPerform their competitors and better serving their customers.

If we aren’t prepared to change, we deserve what we get — but that’s always been true, the web hasn’t changed any of that.

Let’s stop apologizing for our professions, let’s not abandon our responsibilities to our customers, our companies, and ourselves to create great value.  It’s not time to give up, it’s time to get more aggressive in the changes we have to make in ourselves and how we engage our customers.

Mid-year is approaching.  I’m talking to a lot of people about where they are with quota performance.  With too many, their hands start waving around, the stories start, the excuses start.

“We’re still seeing the effects of the economy, customers aren’t buying….”  I know their peers in the same company are making the numbers, their competitors are selling, so I wonder.

“Our marketing programs and collateral are really insufficient, I don’t have the tools I need to be successful…”  Again, there are a number of their peers faced with the same thing who don’t let this stop them.

“”We just don’t have enough leads….”  I’ve never met a salesperson that has enough leads, so I wonder, what’s stopping them from prospecting.

“The dog ate my sales call plan…….”

I may be a little hardnosed about this, but there is only one thing sacrosanct in sales, it’s The Number.  Our job, our responsibility, our obligation to our companies is to do everything possible to make our number.  There are simply no excuses.

Everything else about sales is changeable, but we can’t change our obligation to make the number.

If we don’t have enough leads, then we have to do something.  Can we get referrals, can we go back to past customers to see if they have a need?  How do we start prospecting to find new opportunities?

If our customers aren’t buying, how do we find those that are?  Can we create a different or more compelling value proposition.  How do we find those customers that are buying?  Let’s invest our time in those that are.

We don’t have the right materials and collateral—-well create it yourself!  Never let materials, tools, collateral stop you.

There are simply no excuses to do everything you possibly can do to make your number!

Does this mean you’ll be successful?  Well you won’t be successful if you don’t, that’s virtually guaranteed.  But doing everything you possibly can may still mean you don’t make the number.  But at least you have learned, you have solid data about why and you can leverage that data to improve.

Sales success is about leaving no stone unturned.  It’s about figuring out what it tales to win and owning the responsibility for that.  It’s about determination–not letting anything to keep you from achieving your goals. Sometimes it means we have to change our approaches.  What has worked in the past may not be successful, so we have to figure out what creates success.  We may have to develop new skills, we may have to change our process, we may have to go after different customers, we may have to be clearer about our value proposition.  Everything in sales is open to change—except for making the number.

Are you prepared to change everything to achieve your goals?  Are you totally committed to achieving them and will let nothing stand in your way?

The human brain is an awesome instrument!  One of the things it enables us to do, sometimes almost unconsciously, is to instantly recognize patterns.  We encounter a situation, in nano seconds, our brains compare the situation with others we have encountered through our life.  It quickly enables us to recognize, “I’ve encountered something like this before—-this is how I recognized it, this is what I did, this is what happened as a result.”  We do it thousands of times a day, comparing everything we have encountered, looking for common patterns that have produced successful outcomes, then acting based on our experience of those patterns.

Top performers take this even further.  They move pattern recognition from the unconscious to the conscious.  They constantly compare the characteristics of what they are encountering to their experiences in the past.  They understand the characteristics or variables that are most critical to what they are trying to achieve, they assess the actions they should take based on those characteristics.  They also assess what’s different about these patterns and can quickly adjust what they do based on their past experience and the assessment of the current situation.

People who have mastered something–say a top athlete, musician, someone who has invested the 10,000 hours experts say is required for mastery have thousands of patterns built up in their brains, they have the ability to quickly assess situations they encounter, match that with the most appropriate patterns from their past experience and quickly act.  This capability is often called “muscle memory” or “instinct,” but is really the result of the brain’s tremendous pattern recognition, pattern processing capabilities.

Top performers in sales do the same thing.  They have patterns built up, based on their experience.  They are quickly able to evaluate a customer and just “know” the right way to deal with that customer.  They encounter a sales opportunity and are able to assess it against their past experience, leveraging that experience to develop and execute winning strategies.  Top sales people constantly seek to replicate that experience—find customer that fit the past patterns of success, find situations and opportunities that match the most successful opportunities from the past, and leverage that experience to be successful in these current situations.

When you speak to top sales performers about this, they can precisely describe what they look for (the patterns) and how those patterns influence their activities.  When you watch them in action, they are constantly looking for those situations that match the patterns of past success.  In fact, what they are describing is their personal sales process—the things they look for, the things they do, the responses they expect based on what they have experienced in the past.

The sales process–when taken from an individual level to and organizational level is really the collection of all those past patterns of success.  It is based on the collective experiences and collective patterns of top performers and what has made them successful.  The sales process becomes a “template” or a pattern that all other sales people can leverage to increase their success.  In some sense, it’s a shortcut to the 10,000 hours to mastery, because you are able to leverage the collective “10,000 hours” of all the top performers.

Do you recognize the patterns of your own past successes in sales?  Are you able to leverage them to improve your own personal effectiveness?

Are you leveraging the collective experiences and successes of everyone in the sales organization to contribute to your personal success–you can’t be doing this if your organization doesn’t have a sales process, or you aren’t using it?

Do you constantly update your sales process, based on the new patterns of success you see?

Every year, I sit through hundreds of deal reviews.  They all seem to go the same way.  The sales person talks about the deal, the competition, what the sales person or team has done.  Too often, too much time is spent reviewing and discussing past history.  However, at some point in the review, the discussion shifts to, “What do we do next?”

Often, there’s a bit of an uncomfortable silence.  Then a lot of random ideas start surfacing, “We should probably meet with…..,”  “Maybe we should do this……, “  “Let’s do a demo…..,” “Let’s have one of our executives call on them…..,” “What if we tried this…..”

I’m always struck by the seeming randomness of the discussion.  Lots of brainstorming, lots of (and some very good) ideas, but they sometimes seem unfocused or like we are grasping at straws struggling to identify the critical next steps in improving our positioning, and moving to winning a deal.

There’s simply no reason for this.  There’s no reason to be guessing, there’s no reason for the randomness in thinking.  The next steps must always be purposeful and have a strong direction.  They must be based on our experience in winning deals, knowing what’s most effective in producing results, and how we win.

Guess what, the tool that we use to do this, executing our best practices consistently is the Sales Process.  The sales process provides direction and context to our discussion on what’s next.  While the specifics will vary deal by deal, the Sales Process provides a structure and framework that’s based on our best practices and knowledge of what wins.

The conversations that are random brainstorming sessions, the confused discussions about what to do next are the result of not having a Sales Process–or not using it.  In the absence of a sales process, we have to “invent” a way to win each time every time.  We have to invent it continuously as the customer executes their buying process.  We aren’t leveraging our experience of what it takes to win, so we put our ability to win at greater risk.

One of the best things about a Sales Process is it provides a structure and a framework that helps us win!  It helps us understand what it takes to win and provides us a starting point to answer the question, “What do we do next?”  Why not focus the next steps based on what we know causes us to win, rather than guessing?  Why not use the process as the starting point to identifying specifically what advances us–yest we have to adjust what we do to the specifics of the situation, but we do in a structured, efficient and effective context.

I don’t know about you, but somehow winning–and winning fast is important to me.  I can’t imagine having to guess.  I can’t imagine putting my ability to win at risk–in fact I want to minimize that risk.  I can’t imagine not leveraging our best practices to give me direction and insight into what to do next.  I can’t imagine not leveraging the Sales Process for it’s maximum impact.

Are you comfortable with guessing and putting your ability to win at risk?  If you are, then you don’t need a Sales Process.  If not, then the answer should be clear.

Recently I was in China in a series of meetings with CEO’s of Chinese companies.  The meetings were great, but we each struggled to maximize their impact.  My Mandarin is very limited–basically to “Hello,”  “Thank you,” and a couple of other words.  Many of the executives spoke some English and were very polite in trying to communicate in a way that I could understand.

Mostly we relied on an interpreter.  The problem was, the interpreter interpreted the discussion–that is he describe things based on how he heard them, not necessarily what was intended.  So we had to be very careful in what we were saying and in verifying that we were aligned in our discussions and what we were trying to achieve.  Fortunately, our shared intention allowed us to be effective in our meetings.

Often, when I go on sales calls with sales people, I think that we are speaking different languages.  The customer is speaking their language, the sales person is speaking their—and there is no interpreter.

Each of organization and industry have their own terminology, jargon, buzzwords, and shorthand.  We have ways of expressing things, that others may not understand.  Too often, I see sales people reeling off terms and acronyms–often to make them sound important, but meaningless to the customer.  Or sales people don’t take the time to understand and communicate in terms that are meaningful to the customer.

A very simple example–many years ago, I managed an organization whose key customer segments were automotive and aerospace design engineers.  Even though the design processes were very similar, the terminology used in each industry were profoundly different.  Automotive engineers tended to talk about “flow lines,”  aerospace engineers tended to talk about “aerodynamics.”  Same concepts, but if we used the term “flow line” with the aerospace guys, we would both lose credibility but we would lose the customer–they wouldn’t understand what we were talking about.

As sales people, we want to maximize our impact on the customer.  We want to make sure our customers understand us and that we understand the customer.  It’s not the customer’s job to speak our language—we have to speak the customer’s language.

This goes beyond the words we and our customers use.  Each industry has key processes, metrics, practices, business drivers.  These are ingrained in everything the customer does.  For us to be impactful, we have to understand all of these, what they mean to the customer and how we can impact them.

Do you understand your customer’s language?

Do you speak the customer’s language?

Do you understand the key metrics, processes, practices, and business drivers for your customer?

A well known saying, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”  I’d like to add a corollary, “It helps to pay attention to the signposts.”  

Yes, this is a post about establishing and executing plans.  Whether it’s a plan to win a deal, to make a high impact sales call, to maximize your share within the account or territory, to make your quota, to hire the right people……  For all of these, we maximize our effectiveness and the quality of the result by having well defined goals and strategies in place, and refining our plan based on signs/signals we see as we execute the plan.

Many will say, “Dave, I have a plan and goals–my goal is to win a deal, my goal is to make quota….”  This is insufficient, the highest performers we have to know what path we are going to take to achieve our goal.  With aimless wandering, we may achieve our goal, but it could take us a very long time. 

High performers develop a specific plan, they map out specifically how they will achieve their goals.  Their plan focuses on effectiveness, efficiency, and impact.  They are purposeful in what they want to achieve, so they have strong plans in place.  If it’s a sales call, they are focused on accomplishing as much as possible–compressing their sales cycle.  If it’s a deal strategy, they focus on aligning with the customer buying process, creating the greatest value in the process, outperforming the competition.  If it’s a manager hiring a new sales person, they have a profile of the ideal candidate, they look for those that best match that profile.

With a plan that is purposeful, high performers can adapt to “road conditions.”  They recognize when things may be going off target — without a plan it’s impossible.  They are sensitive to the “signs” along the way–they can see obstacles, adjust their strategies to avoid or overcome them, they can see opportunities, taking advantage of them.

Everyone is time constrained–our customers, our team members, our managers.  We don’t have enough time to accomplish everything we want or need to accomplish.  The highest performers manage this by having clear plans in place, executing those plans relentlessly, by paying attention to the signals they encounter–adjusting their plans appropriately?

Do you know where you are going?

Do you have a plan to get there?

Does your plan maximize your effectiveness in achieving your goal?

Does you adjust your plan based on signals you see on the way?

A strong sales process is critical to our effectiveness as sales professionals.  Without a strong process, it’s comparable to an aimless walk—we may reach our destination, but then again we may not.  Or we may reach our destination after an overly long journey.

As much as has been written about sales processes, I am constantly amazed by the number of organization that either have no process in place, their process is hopelessly outdated, or the sales people and managers don’t use the process.  We can never achieve the highest levels of performance without a process.

So since our goal is to develop the sales process that maximizes our personal effectiveness as sales professional, I thought it useful to outline five conditions your sales process must satisfy to enable you to be best in class.  I’ve restricted this to five, I’m interested in differing views.  Have I chosen the right five or should a different five be selected? (Please, out of pure arbitrariness I’m restricting this to five.  So if you have a sixth or seventh, you have to eliminate some of the original items.)

Condition 1:  Your sales process must not only be aligned with the customers buying process, but it must enable you to help lead and facilitate the customer’s buying process.  Too often we’re glib in talking about the customer buying process, when we really are talking about our sales process.  But buyers rule.  Buying is very complex.  They have to organize themselves to recgnize a problem or opportunity.  They have to get people invovled, define their goals, define how they will make a decision, align themselves internally, and do all sorts of other things.  In the world of complex B2B solutions, customers don’t know how to buy, they may not know they should buy (that is they have an opportunity or a problem).  Sales demonstrates it’s leadership and creates great value by aligning everything they do with the customer buying process.  If your sales process doesn’t drive this kind of behavior in your sales people, go back to Go, do not collect $200 and start all over again.

Condition 2:  The sales process is for the sales people, not anyone else.  The sales process is focused on helping sales people develop and execute high impact sales strategies. It focuses on deals and how sales people win deals.  The sales process is not for sales managers—though managers must use the process in coaching their people, and can get tremendous insight into deals, pipelines, and performance; but all of that is icing on the cake.  Sales people have to be involved in the design and development of the sales process, after all it’s for them and they must own and execute it.  There is no reason to have a sales process other than making sales people more effective.  If your sales people aren’t the center of your focus in your sales process, Go To Jail!

Condition 3:  The sales process must help your sales people improve their ability to win.  It has to be based on your best experience–things your best sales people consistently do to win.  It is unique to your organization, not something generic to all sales people.  You win and lose for specific reasons, there are uniqe trigger events or activities, that dramatically improve your ability to win.  If your sales process is not based on your sales people’s own experience, deep analysis of why you win, why you lose, what events amplify your ability to win, tear it up and start all over again.

Condition 4:  Your sales process should help your sales people compress the sales cycle. We know that wandering aimlessly through the sale results in sales cycles that never end.  The sales process provides structure and focus to the activities sales people undertake.  Sales people should constantly be looking at each opportunity, identifying where they are in the sales process and seeking to compress the process as much as possible.  The salles process provides a framework for the sales person to look at the next steps or critical activities, they can analyze them, they can consider “How many can I accomplish in my next step with the customer?”  Managers in coaching sales people on their deals should look at this, helping the sales person understand where the cycle can be compressed.

Condition 5:  Your sales process must maximize your deal value or profitability.  I know those sales people and organizations whose sole strategy is to win on price don’t read my blogs.  There’s no skill in winning by price, there’s no value creation if you compete by being the lowest cost supplier (all other things equal).  So if you are reading this, you are interested in maximizing your deal value or profitability.  This means how you create value, how you communicate it, how you deliver it needs to be integral to your sales process.  It requires that your process focuses you on customers in your sweet spot, who demand and appreciate the value you create.  It demands that you can differentiate that value from the alternatives the customer is considering–if you can’t your only option is to win by price.

Does your sales process match all these criteria?  If it doesn’t, then you have a bad process.  You will never be able to maxmize the performance of each sales person, you will never maximize the performance of your team or organization.  It isn’t tough to design, your top performers already know it, though they may execute it unconsciously.

Does your sales process match some of the criteria?  Reassess it, tune it, improve it.  No sales process is forever.  How customers buy evolves, your value proposition and value creation evolves, competitors and customers raise the bar.  What worked a few years ago, may not be the most effective now?

If you don’t have a sales process, then you already know you aren’t performing at the highest levels possible.  In fact there is huge room for improvement!  Put together a team of your highest performers, lock them in a room for a couple of days, do some analysis. develop an initial cut of your process–making sure it satisfies all five conditions.  Roll it out, use it for six months, then tune it based on your experience.

If you have a good sales process in place and you aren’t using it, shame on you!  If you want to be a top performer, you have to use everything you can, you have to maximize your performance.  The sales process is the biggest lever a sales professional has to improving performance.

Do I have the right five?  I think so, but I’d love your views.  Remember, I’m arbitrary, I’m not interested in six, seven or more condition, I am only interested in the top five.  What are your thoughts?

I sit in hundreds of review sessions every year.  Pipeline reviews, territory reviews, account reviews, opportunity reviews, call reviews.  An odd thing happens in about 90% of the reviews, they all become deal reviews.

Think about the last pipeline review you participated in.  It starts out with a review of the pipeline, pretty soon, someone–perhaps the manager, perhaps a participant, perhaps the sales person doing the review, focuses on a particular deal.  All of a sudden the conversation shifts and becomes a deal review.  Seldom do we get back to reviewing the pipeline, if we do, it’s only for a moment.  Soon another deal is highlighted and we get into another deal review.

The same thing happens in account or territory reviews.  We start talking about the account or territory plan, and within a few minutes, a deal pops up and we shift our focus to a deal.

I see this in review session after review session.  We start with one type of review and soon the review shifts to talking about deals.  It’s no wonder, as sales people or managers we’re continually focused on doing deals–chasing opportunities.  It’s natural that we shift, almost unconsciously into deal reviews.  We end up never completing the review we had intended.

Deal reviews are important–we want to look at what it takes to win, how we can maximize the deal profitability, how we can reduce the sales cycle.  We all gravitate to talking about deals.

But we can’t overlook territory, pipeline, account, and call reviews.  These are important–each serves a different function, each important to achieving our goals.

Reviews serve two important purposes–both for the manager and sales person.  First, they help us manage the business.  They help us understand what’s happening, whether we are going to achieve our goals, or to identify problems or obstacles.  The review process is a powerful coaching opportunity.  Managers need to leverage these reviews to help develop their people, sales people need the coaching, help, insight to help improve their performance.

Each review has a different focus and objective.

Deal reviews:  We spend a lot of time on deal reviews–rightfully so, this is where we spend most of our time.  The objectives of a deal review are to determine how we maximize our probability of winning, how we compress the cycle, how we maximize deal profitability.  As managers or sales people, we want to make sure we are positioned to win, that we are aligned with our customers, creating the greatest value possible.

Pipeline reviews:  Funnel or pipeline reviews are critical.  They enable us to look at all the all the deals we are pursuing.  Do we have enough deals to achieve our quotas?  Do we have good flow through the funnel?  Is anything getting stuck?  Are we feeding enough new deals into the top of the funnel?  Are there systemic things that impact our effectiveness.  A pipeline review looks at the overall state of the business, not at specific deals.

Account review:  In any account, we may have many things going on.  Lot of deals, projects, extending our relationships into new parts of the account.  An account review focuses on all aspects of the account.  In some cases, it is similar to a pipeline review–we may want to look at the number and quality of deals we are pursuing.  The account review also represents an a prospecting plan.  What are we doing to expand our relationships in the account, how do we leverage these activities to identify more opportunities to pursue.  An account review allows us to focus on the quality of our relationship—are we maximizing our value to the customer, are we important to the customer?  It allows us to look at is the customer good for us, are we maximizing the profitability of the customer.  It allows us to look at the strategic relationship we want to have with the customer.

Territory reviews:  Territory reviews are similar to account reviews, but rather than focusing on a particular account, we look at the territory.  Are we maximizing our penetration of the territory?  Where are there new opportunities?  What can we do to maximize our share of the territory.

Call reviews:  Call reviews are very closely tied to deal reviews.  We execute our deal strategy by making calls.  In a call review, we want to debrief a particular call.  In addition to the “to-dos” and next steps in the sales process, we want to take the time to assess our effectiveness in the call.  Did we accomplish everything we had planned?  Could we have accomplished more?  Is there anything we would have changes?  What did we learn and how do we apply it to future calls.  The problem with call reviews is usually we focus on the “to-dos” and miss the opportunity to discuss our impact and effectiveness.

Each of the types of reviews is very important to managing our effectiveness, performance, and impact.  We need to do each–generally we do deal and call reviews quite frequently, every week.  Pipeline/funnel reviews–unless you have very short sales cycles, don’t need to be conducted as frequently.  Territory and Account reviews–unless there’s a lot of change, usually need to be done once a quarter, sometimes even less.

To maximize the value of each review–keep focused on what you are trying to achieve in the review.  The temptation is always to talk about deals, but unless you are doing opportunity reviews, you need to focus on what you are trying to achieve in the review process.

I’ve been following a discussion on cold calling.  The topic of “Interruption Based Selling” came up, with several people taking strong stands against this.

Frankly, I think it’s our obligation to “Interrupt”–particularly if we want to create real value for our customers.  Waiting for the customer to reach out, waiting for the customer to recognize a need is often too late–both for the customer and most of the time for sales.

Our customers are just like everyone else.  They’re incredibly busy just doing their jobs.  They are consumed with keeping things going.  They don’t have the time, or may not be motivated to think of how they can improve or change their businesses.  Perhaps, every once in a while, in a strategic planning retreat, they think about the future, they think about innovation, they think about change.  But then, on Monday they go back to their jobs, and the best of intentions fall by the wayside.

Problems occur, then our customers are motivated to solve the problems–that is what they perceive the problem to be.  They begin to research, they look at alternative solutions, they find a few potential solutions, if we’re lucky we get a phone call.  They say, “This is what I want…..  It looks like you have a solution….  I have a couple of questions….   What’s your best price?”

If we don’t want to “Interrupt,” this becomes our world as sales people:   We wait for the phone call. 

The problem is, what if there aren’t enough phone calls?  What if the volume, timing, and flow is insufficient to meet our goals?  Do we intensify our blogging efforts, do we run more ads, do we do more seminars, do we engage in a frenzy of activity to attract interest?  Do those things create the volume of calls that enable us to meet our goals?

We know this is wrong for us, but it’s wrong for the customer.  What if the customer diagnoses their problem incorrectly?  What if they are looking at the symptoms and not the real problems?  What if the research they do includes information that might be inaccurate, out of date, or just plain wrong?  Our customers are expert in running their operations, but they may not be expert in determining the best solutions to their problems.

It’s wrong for the customer from another point of view, why should they have to incur the problem before they change?  What if they could pre-empt the problem and avoid it?  They may not recognize they have a problem brewing, but we are expert in knowing the problems we solve and in identifying them–or identifying the early symptoms of the problems.  Don’t we owe it to our customers to “interrupt” them and call the problem to their attention?

It’s wrong for the customer because they may miss opportunities.  They may be so busy in the day to day exectution of their jobs, they don’t have the time to think about new possibilities, they don’t have the time to look at new opportunities.  They may be prisoners of their own experience and may not even recognize opportunities that are presenting themselves.  Don’t we owe it to our customers to “interupt” them and teach them about the new opportunities or possibilities?  Don’t we owe it to them to think about the future.

Sales is about change.  Change is a disruption to the status quo, an interruptions to what customers are currently doing.  However we choose to couch it, what we do is interrupt the customer.

The term “interruption” is polarizing.  None of us like to be interrupted.  Whether it’s expressing a thought in a meeting–and someone interrupts us as we are speaking, or we are preoccupied with the tasks that are on our to do lists, we don’t like to be interrupted.

So like it or not, if we are to be successful and if we are to help our customers succeed, we have to interrupt. 

I think the problem with interruptions are those that are just a waste of time, those that create no value for the customer.  Those are not only intrusive, but they are unforgivable.

I interrupt my customers and prospects every day.  While we may have scheduled a meeting, I am disrupting their normal routine.  None of them block time to talk to consultants or sales people.  I interrupt my customers and prospects with prospecting emails or other communications.  If I do my job when I interrupting my customers and prospects, the customers don’t view it as an interruption.  They will think they have used their time well, they have learned something.  Until that happens, it’s still an interruption — and I have to be really sensitive to the fact that I am interrupting them.  But I can’t let that stop me.  Customers and prospects will continue to let me “interrupt” their routine, as long as I use their time well.  While it may be an interruption, it’s neither intrusive nor unappreciated.

I understand the issue about interuptions, but the reality is a large part of our job as sales people is interupting our customers and prospects.  We shouldn’t shy away from it–this would be irresponsible to our customers and our companies.  But we have to be very sensitive to creating value in each interuption.  In the end, if the customer says, “That was a good investment of my time,” then it really hasn’t been intrusive or unappreciated.